Claude, meet Clippy. If you've got Microsoft Word, you can now use Anthropic's AI assistant Claude within the software as an alternative to Copilot, the company announced in a LinkedIn post.

The add-on is now available to Claude customers with Team or Enterprise plans, and is free to try. The feature is currently in beta testing, and Anthropic did not indicate when a broader rollout would occur. 

Companies use the beta period to test new products with a smaller subset of people to discover bugs, gauge usability and get feedback. Then, they can make fixes and hone the product before a wider release.

Anthropic continues to get Claude into different workplace software tools. Launched in June 2024, the AI assistant is available in Google Workspace programs such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. Claude can also be integrated into Slack, the communication and collaboration platform. 

Last week, Anthropic announced that its AI agent tool Claude Cowork is now available on paid plans for both MacOS and Windows.

For many Word users, Claude could be a welcome alternative to Copilot, an AI assistant launched by Microsoft in February 2023. Copilot is reportedly losing ground to competitors, and its ubiquitousness in Windows 11 and many other Microsoft software programs has been a sore spot for some customers.

Copilot isn't the first Microsoft Word helper to exasperate people. People of a certain age will recall Clippy, a digital assistant built into Word in 1996. Though now considered nostalgic and iconic, Clippy irritated Word users at the time by popping up with often-useless suggestions, and was hard to disable. 

Clippy was no longer enabled by default on April 11, 2001, but it's now available as a Chrome extension -- popping up whenever you visit a web page (for appearances only, as it doesn't provide any assistance).

In its announcement this week, Anthropic said Claude, like Copilot, can do a variety of tasks. You can create new content and help edit existing documents. For document generation, you can "open your template and describe what you need." For editing existing documents, you can "highlight a paragraph and tell Claude to tighten it, shift the tone or cut passive voice," and it can identify broken cross-references.

Anthropic also touted Claude's ability to work with comments others might add to a document. The company said Claude can read and analyze comments, then respond to them as instructed.

In an example from the announcement, Claude was asked to "summarize what the partner's counsel changed" in a mutual nondisclosure agreement. Claude then listed several changes made to the NDA, including two that were potential "dealbreakers." The customer instructed Claude to push back on those changes and send back new contract language to the other party.

There were many comments on Anthropic's LinkedIn post about the Claude add-in for Word. One person complained that "sometimes Claude decides on its own to generate an MS Office document," while someone else commented, "Love to see it and was waiting for this release."